[Python-Dev] Status on PEP-431 Timezones (original) (raw)

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Thu Apr 9 01:32:12 CEST 2015

On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 8:32 AM, Alexander Belopolsky <alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com> wrote:

A "named offset" is an abbreviation such as UTC, EST, MSK, MSD which (at any given time) corresponds to a fixed offset from UTC.

That assumes the abbreviations are unique. They're not. Just this morning I had to explain to a new student of mine that no, my time zone is not "EST" = New York time, it's actually "EST" = Melbourne time. Granted, most of the time New York and Melbourne are opposite on DST, so one will be EST and one EDT, but that trick won't always help you.

(BTW, thanks Lennart for your "Blame it on Caesar" PyCon talk. I linked my student to it as a "for further information" resource. Good fun, and a great summary of why political time is such a minefield.)

If this proposal goes through, in some form or another, will there be One Obvious Way to do timezone-aware calculations in Python? That would definitely be an improvement.

ChrisA

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